137 | Justin Clarke-Doane on Mathematics, Morality, Objectivity, and Reality

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2021

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On a spectrum of philosophical topics, one might be tempted to put mathematics and morality on opposite ends. Math is one of the most pristine and rigorously-developed areas of human thought, while morality is notoriously contentious and resistant to consensus. But the more you dig into the depths, the more alike these two fields appear to be. Justin Clarke-Doane argues that they are very much alike indeed, especially when it comes to questions of “reality” and “objectivity” — but that they aren’t quite exactly analogous. We get a little bit into the weeds, but this is a case where close attention will pay off.

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Justin Clarke-Doane received his Ph.D. in philosophy from New York University. He is currently Associate Professor of philosophy at Columbia University, as well as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and Adjunct Research Associate at Monash University. His book Morality and Mathematics was published in 2020.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:02.9	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.6	And on the podcast in various episodes and various guises, we've talked about morality,
0:09.8	right?
0:10.8	The ideas of right and wrong and ethics and so forth, the philosophy behind it.
0:14.6	It's a notoriously tricky subject.
0:16.7	People don't agree either on ethics, what is right, what is wrong, or on meta-ethics,
0:22.6	how we even decide what is right and what is wrong.
0:25.6	So the whole subject of morality, even though it's very important, we need to make decisions
0:29.9	about what to do in our lives.
0:32.2	It's notoriously difficult to reach consensus to find agreement on what things are true.
0:36.7	It's not like math, where you say two plus two and everyone says four, right?
0:40.7	Everyone is an agreement about that.
0:42.6	So turns out, guess what, spoiler alert.
0:45.9	There are a lot more similarities if you really dig in between the ways that we can and
0:51.8	should and do talk about morality and the ways that we can and should and do talk about
0:56.8	mathematics.
0:58.0	We have a feeling that math is enormously more rigorous and agreed upon only because we
1:03.1	don't think about it that hard.
1:05.2	Once you really approach the philosophy of mathematics, the foundations of the subject,
1:10.3	you realize people don't agree, as Kurt Gertel famously proved, there are apparently true
1:16.0	statements that you can't actually prove as theorems and so forth, and you can actually
	...

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